This essay contextualizes Ihara Saikaku’s comedy within broader elements of Tokugawa society and critical concepts in literary studies. The complexity of Saikaku’s work is examined by employing and altering Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the “carnivalesque” and rhetorical tropes from Japanese and Western literary traditions. Saikaku’s comedy engages elite and lowly as well as social and literary hierarchies in its constant inversions and play.
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© 2001 Society for Japanese Studies
2001
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